Vox editor doesn't want people to overthink cable's bias against old, white presidential candidate

Brett T. | 9:58 PM on September 03, 2016

It’s Saturday night, it’s a holiday weekend, and it looks like no one should count on any full-on Voxsplanations™ to guide the way through the chaos and tumult until Tuesday morning.

Vox was founded on the premise of explaining things and not just presenting them, like those dinosaurs on cable do, by using cool graphics and card stacks and really, really bad maps. But just this one time, Voxxer Matthew Yglesias doesn’t want the public to overthink the media’s obvious bias in its coverage of the 2016 election cycle.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/772234300615979009

It’s just that obvious: no one watches cable news anymore except old, white people, so of course the networks are going to cater their coverage to supporters of the old, white candidate. What’s funny is that the oldest, whitest candidate had the strongest connection with millennials whose tech-savvy parents had cut the cable but somehow forgot to cut the cord; meanwhile, Hillary Clinton had to enlist hip surrogates like Lena Dunham and Katy Perry to bring the youngsters by the Prius-load to her rallies.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/772234980462297088

We see what he did there. It’s too bad the Great MSNBC Purge of 2015 cost cable viewers such a rich array of opinions, and this year young progressives are wishing they’d watched Larry Wilmore more often; who knew a huge plunge in viewership would cause Comedy Central to yank his show? Good thing Vox is there to provide balance for the rest of the media.

Vox has got this. Not only has the election been called, but the reason for Trump’s loss has too: no one watches cable news, so they’ve escaped Sean Hannity’s extraordinarily subtle yet irresistible hypnotic implantation of his vote Trump message. But if Christopher Hayes had Bill O’Reilly’s ratings, it would be a different world.

We weren’t supposed to overthink this, right?